After Eight Hundred Years
by Gamma Orionis
Summary: After eight hundred years, someone told her that they wanted to hear her story. Written for the "Snowboarding – Halfpipe" event in the Hogwarts Winter Games


Author's Notes: Written for the "Snowboarding – Halfpipe" event in the Hogwarts Winter Games – write about a crack pairing.

)O(

Helena first spoke to Tom Riddle late on a winter's evening, in the year 1946.

The castle was always pleasantly quiet at night, but that evening more than ever. Most of the students were home for Christmas, and those few that weren't were safely tucked away in their warm common rooms, not stalking corridors that were as cold and dank as ever Helena had known them to be. She herself was on her way to the Ravenclaw common room, just to see that her students were well, and then she intended to find some quiet tower in which she could settle and read, and when she rounded a corner, lost in thought, it took her a second to even take note of the young man walking hurriedly along the corridor, towards the Ravenclaw common room's entrance. It took a second longer still for her to see the green trimming on his uniform, and the edge of a green and silver tie peeking from beneath his shirt collar.

_Slytherin_.

"What brings a boy like you here?" she asked.

The boy turned and looked at her, and a brief expression of surprise, and an even briefer one of fear passed across his face before he straightened and adopted a polite, nonchalant smile. Even without the green and silver tie, she would have been able to see in an instant that he was a Slytherin – he had much of Salazar's face about him, and even more of his demeanour. She could not help but smile at his exaggeratedly pleasant facade. She could practically see the cogs in his poor little brain working as he tried to think of an excuse for his presence. But when his mouth opened, what came out was not the clumsy justification that she had expected.

"Helena Ravenclaw?"

The smile dropped from her face immediately.

"I don't believe we've met." Then, indicating his tie with a flick of her finger, she added, "I do not make a habit of speaking with young men of your house."

"Oh, but I've heard so much about you." The overwrought politeness faded as quickly as his surprise and fear had, replaced by an almost eager smile. "Your fame is incredible. Truth be told, I came here in hopes of speaking to you."

"My fame?" Helena Ravenclaw moved closer to him, until they were face-to-face, close enough that he would have felt her breath if she had had any. His dark eyes were clear and steady, not clouded by the usual signs of deception that she had become so intimately familiar with, and yet she knew his words to be untrue. "You lie, young man. I have no fame."

"But you do." He reached out and almost touched her hand, and she drew back quickly. She shied away from any sort of contact like a nervous horse – she had, even when she was alive. The boy did not seem offended. "People speak of you often, and always glowingly – although, perhaps it would not be in good taste for me to tell you..."

"Tell me what?"

"Well." He lifted a hand, a graceful variation on a shrug. "Your tale – as I have heard it – is so very tragic, and you... you are much pitied – surely you know..."

"I would like to know what you have heard about me, Slytherin, that should give you the impression that I am someone to be pitied!" She felt herself rising, without being fully conscious of it, until she was looming quite menacingly over him. The boy did not look menaced.

"Perhaps pity was the wrong word – no, no, many do feel pity," he corrected himself. "But I do not. From all I have heard about you, you were a remarkable woman, unfairly victimized by a cruel world that did not appreciate you for anything more than being the daughter of Rowena Ravenclaw. The thought of such a talented witch being – through no fault of her own – cast aside..." He trailed off and shook his head, then bowed it. "I do hope that I have not caused offence. I shall go."

"Wait."

He had taken half a step past her, and he moved back and looked up with a face as open and earnest as any she had seen.

"People speak of me?"

Oh, how she had dreamed for these hundreds of years that one day, she would be the one who people spoke about with reverence, knowing that it would never happen; that she would always be lesser than her mother – and yet, this boy said that they _did_ speak...

"Oh, yes. But I had so hoped that I could hear you tell your own story – but I see now that I shouldn't have come looking for you, especially not so late."

"No. Don't go." She reached out, letting her hand hover just above his arm, to indicate that he shouldn't move. "I should love to speak to you. Let us find somewhere where we will not be disturbed."

The boy smiled.

"Thank you," he said.

_No_, she thought. _Thank you._

After eight hundred years, someone told her that they wanted to hear her story.

)O(

The two of them sat together in a secluded stairwell for the whole of the night. The boy – who introduced himself rather humbly as Tom; a name so common that she would not have expected it from someone who carried himself with such poise, yet one she felt suited him rather well – listened to her stories about growing up in Hogwarts's early days with an expression of absolute rapture. He made frequent exclamations of surprise or delight when she described the classes taught by her mother and her mother's friends, and in particular, when she told him about Salazar.

"You look very much like him, you know," she said, and he said, "So I've been told."

And then she came to the part of her story in which she had run away, and she was shocked when he did not so much as blink when she mentioned her theft of her mother's diadem. People had talked about that circlet often, often within her hearing, and it made anger boil within her that people cared more for it than they did for her. Tom did nod and draw his brows together slightly when it came up, but he did not interrupt her to ask if she knew where it was or how it could be used, and for that, she was grateful.

And when she told him of her death at the Baron's hands in Albania, he wiped his eyes and whispered that it was a dreadful thing that such a tragedy should befall someone who only sought to better herself.

He _understood_.

For the first time, Helena found herself not blamed for her actions – indeed, when she pressed him (asking "Do you think I was wrong to run away from her? Do you think I was too proud?"), he assured her with absolute conviction that she had been quite right to run away, and that he, had he been in her position, would have done the very same thing.

By the time she had finished telling him about her life, the night was long gone, and the poor boy's eyes were red with lack of sleep, but even still, he seemed reluctant to leave her, and she was no less reluctant to see him go.

"Perhaps," she said, "perhaps we could meet again and... and speak more. Perhaps tomorrow night."

"Yes," he said. "I should like that very much."

After eight hundred years, a living person had wanted to speak to her.

)O(

Never before had she met a man so compassionate as Tom. If other such men existed, none had ever tried to reach out to her before. Their nights together – in whatever nook or cranny they could take to without risk of being interrupted – quickly became the one thing in her meaningless existence that mattered.

He had a knack for asking just the right questions to bring back all the old wounds, the old injustices that she had suffered, and more than once, she found herself sobbing tearlessly into her hands as the pain of a thousand little injuries came back in a rush, and he put his hand through hers so that she might almost feel a touch of warmth. Details that she had long forgotten came spilling out when she was with him. And then, when she had finished crying, she felt better, lighter, freer of her burdens than ever before.

Tom was not unwilling to share his own stories either, though Helena had to probe for them, and even when she did, she occasionally wondered whether he was telling her as much as she told him. He told her about the filthy Muggle orphanage in which he had grown up, and his tales of how he had suffered squalor and mistreatment hurt her heart as much as her stories seemed to hurt his. He never shed a tear, and so she cried for him as well, when she was alone as much as when she was with him. She wished that she could gather the poor boy in her arms and give him the mother's embrace that neither of them had ever received.

"I don't want a mother's embrace," he told her, when she said as much to him, and for perhaps the first time, she saw a little pout around his mouth, heard a note of defiance in his voice, and for a second, he seemed very, very young. Tom always gave the air of someone well beyond his age of sixteen, and later, Helena wondered if she had imagined it.

"Then," she said, and put her hand against his cheek, wishing that she could feel it as he did (even if what he felt was only cold), "a different sort of embrace."

But a man who was flesh-and-blood could not embrace a lady who was only a ghost.

"When you die," she said, "promise me that you will stay for me. We could be together then, in ways we cannot now – it would not be so wonderful as if we were both living, but..."

He flinched very slightly, but then he looked at her with those beautiful dark eyes that never lied, and said, "I promise. We shall be together when I die."

Their long conversations about their cruel pasts were the closest form of intimacy they had, and, Helena thought, the closest that she could have truly hoped for. She vastly preferred sitting with him and letting him peel back her defences and draw forth her innermost secrets over the potential alternative of being flesh and blood and able to bed him, if that ability would have come at the expense of the connection they shared in their minds.

Still, she could not help but try to capture for herself the sort of closeness that living people could have so easily. She could not have it, not truly, but she could come close.

He undressed and lay in his bed, and she lay beside him – Baron be damned; she would do as she liked, even in the Slytherin dungeons. Tom did not sleep when she was there – even when he closed his eyes and steadied his breathing, she was still aware that he was awake – and so they spent hours simply lying together in silence.

It was then that she found herself regretting most acutely that she could not give him the physical pleasure and closeness that a living girl could, but he never seemed troubled by it. Perhaps he, as she did, felt that true love was something intellectual, a bond between minds rather than between bodies.

And never before had she had a bond so strong – never before had she been so intimate with anyone.

After eight hundred years, she had a lover.

)O(

_Fin_


End file.
